QOTD: I’m now going to make an argument for rhetorical effect. It is an argument that I don’t believe, because I believe the moral responsibility for the shooting lies exclusively with Omar Mateen. But my argument is far more plausible than blaming Republicans, and in any event I need to justify the headline of the post — and it’s an argument that I’m willing to bet a lot of you will believe. That argument is this: if anyone besides Omar Mateen is morally responsible for this shooting, it is the very people who deliberately and repeatedly ignore the danger posed by radical Islamic terrorism, to the point where they strain to overlook red flags raised by the behavior of a Muslim. After all, we have heard allegations that Mateen, while working as a security guard for a federal contractor, talked about killing people — and yet, his former co-worker alleges, these complaints fell on deaf ears because he was a Muslim.

And nobody has been more staunch in their refusal to ignore the dangers of radical Islam than the editors of the New York Times, who do not even mention ISIS in this editorial, much less tell their readers that the shooter “pledged allegiance to ISIS and referenced the Tsarnaev brothers, the terrorists who exploded bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon.”